The barber shook my hand
this morning. He’s not in the habit of being formally expressive, so I’m
guessing he was trying to thank me for my custom and convey season’s greetings
– though he didn’t say either of those things; he knows by now that I would
probably respond “Bah! Humbug!” so he just said, “All the best.” That was my
last haircut before we fly – in a few days’ time – to Crete, where we will take
shelter from the excesses of the forthcoming period of frenetic over-indulgence,
aka the ‘festive season’. My personal Christmas Card Fairy has taken care of postal
communications, while I have been busy with preparations for the trip. All that
remains is for me to buy a wad of Euros because Cretans, I hear, prefer cash to
credit. This is not a problem, but I wish I had moved sooner: the Brexit
cliff-hanger being acted out in Parliament currently is having a very negative
effect on the value of Sterling and each day that passes records a further
slump in its value. My hope is that our Brexit-crazed parliamentarians will
coalesce in some sort of agreement and that the miserable pound will recover
from the wounds they have inflicted upon it before we get to the airport.
Meanwhile, life goes on
in a compressed “must-do-it-before-Christmas” kind of way. There is a schedule
of hook-ups with friends whom we will not see for a while (including a day-trip
to London to catch a transiting Aussie), an outing of the Heaton Moor Jazz
Appreciation Society to a live performance inspired by Benny Goodman’s music
and a couple of cinema visits. As I write, some of these events are yet to come,
but those that have occurred include a couple of socials and the cinema outings.
The social events have been intimate foursomes of the kind that do not involve
an exchange of gifts but are lightly tinged with tinsel on account of the incidental
proximity of revellers in Christmas jumpers and soundtracks of tediously
regurgitated yuletide musak.
There was no hint of
Christmas at the cinema, however. First, we saw The Old Man and The Gun, a film that surely must be Robert
Redford’s swansong. If so, his acting career is now bookended by portrayals of two
loveable rogues – the Sundance Kid and the Old Man – both of whom were engaged
in the business of bank robbery. Now, although Hollywood has presented it as an
entertaining caper, robbery is condemned, not condoned, by upstanding citizens
and punished by strict laws pertaining to ownership of property. However, I think
this view has probably softened in the years since 2008, when the bankers
themselves pulled off the biggest robbery of all time, leaving us with a legacy
of civic penury, an abiding sense of injustice and a heightened awareness of
the rapacity of corporations. Let’s hear it for bank robbers! Well, all right, that
film is a light-hearted entertainment, but the other one we saw – Disobedience – certainly is not. It tells
of the repercussions consequent upon an individual’s refusal to conform to the
strict rules and conventions of the society into which they were born. On one
level it is a love-story with complications; on another, it is a contemplation
of entropy, the tendency of a closed system to descend into chaos – somewhat like
the Brexit negotiations.
Disobedience came to mind the next day when I was
heading for the loo in a department store. I passed a grey-haired couple and
overheard her say to him “Don’t you move from there!” as she walked away. He
didn’t. When I came back that way he was still standing, forlorn in the Ladies’
Shoes Department, with the strains of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas having no obvious cheering effect upon him.
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